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End of life

The Commons HttpClient project is now end of life, and is no longer being developed.
It has been replaced by the Apache HttpComponents project
in its HttpClient and HttpCore modules,
which offer better performance and more flexibility.

Introduction

The Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is perhaps the most
significant protocol used on the Internet today.
Web services, network-enabled appliances and the growth
of network computing continue to expand the role of the HTTP
protocol beyond user-driven web browsers, while increasing the
number of applications that require HTTP support.

Although the java.net
package provides basic functionality for accessing resources via HTTP,
it doesn't provide the full flexibility or functionality needed
by many applications. The Jakarta Commons HttpClient
component seeks to fill this void
by providing an efficient, up-to-date, and feature-rich package
implementing the client side of the most recent HTTP standards
and recommendations. See the Features page
for more details on standards compliance and capabilities.

Designed for extension while providing robust support for the
base HTTP protocol, the HttpClient component may be of interest
to anyone building HTTP-aware client applications such as web
browsers, web service clients, or systems that leverage or extend
the HTTP protocol for distributed communication.

There are many projects that use HttpClient to provide the core HTTP functionality.
Some of these are open source with project pages you can find on the web
while others are closed source that you would never see or hear about.
The Apache Source License provides maximum flexibility for source and binary
reuse. Please see the
Applications page for projects using HttpClient.

History

HttpClient was started in 2001 as a subproject of the
Jakarta Commons, based on code developed by the
Jakarta Slide project.
It was promoted out of the Commons in 2004, graduating to a separate
Jakarta project. In 2005, the HttpComponents project at Jakarta was
created, with the task of developing a successor
to HttpClient 3.x and to maintain the existing codebase until
the new one is ready to take over.
The Commons project,
cradle of HttpClient,
left Jakarta
in 2007 to become an independent Top Level Project.
Later in the same year, the
HttpComponents
project also left Jakarta to become an independent Top Level Project,
taking the responsibility for maintaining HttpClient with it.